Ethology

“ According to this definition, Ethology is the science which corresponds to the art of education in the widest sense of the term, including the formation of national or collective character as well as individual. ”

“ A science of Ethology, founded on the laws of Psychology, is therefore possible; though little has yet been done, and that little not at all systematically, toward forming it. The progress of this important but most imperfect science will depend on a double process: first, that of deducing theoretically the ethological consequences of particular circumstances of position, and comparing them with the recognized results of common experience; and, secondly, the reverse operation; increased study of the various types of human nature that are to be found in the world ”

“ Esquisse d’une Sociologie. L’Inst. de Sociologie (Solvay) . Notes et Mémoires, Fascicule 2. pp. 306. Bruxelles.
A very important survey of sociology as a branch of ethology [Pg 133] or ecology. The history of ecology, and animal societies are parts which deserve special mention. A diagram, on p. 63, gives the subdivisions of ethology.
Kropotkin, P.
1903. Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution. pp. 348. New York.
Parmelee, M.
1913. ”

“ The widening of the middle age orbis terrarum through voyages of discovery led to the science of ethnology, and the works of Linnaeus, Buffon, Lamarck, and Darwin hastened the formulation of somatic anthropology. In the course of time prehistoric archæology, folk-lore and folk-psychology have been added to these, and the term anthropology, like biology, is now used in a large way to designate a congeries of separate sciences—if, indeed, we permit ourselves to call any body of knowledge whatsoever a separate science. ”

“ Anthropology, ethnology, folklore, and archaeology have grown up largely, if not wholly, to complete the task which history began and answer the questions which historical investigation first raised. In history and the sciences associated with it, i.e., ethnology, folklore, and archaeology, we have the concrete records of that human nature and experience which sociology has sought to explain. In the same sense that history is the concrete, sociology is the abstract, science of human experience and human nature. ”

“ This circumstance, together with the fact that ethnology has often been called upon by other sciences, such as history, sociology, law, ethics, to give a categorical answer to the problems of ultimate origins, is responsible for the over-crowding of anthropological books and journals with fantastic speculations which are at best of interest as material for the ethnologist rather than as contributions to ethnological science. The critical student is therefore doubly concerned about a careful methodology of historic reconstruction in ethnology. ”

“ While, from this theoretical point of view, anthropology must devote itself to the investigation of human types and human activities and thought the world over, its actual field of work is much more restricted. Biology and psychology on the one hand, and history, economics, sociology, and philology on the other, have taken up anthropological problems, each from its own point of view, and each in connection with its own subject of investigation. ”

“ SOCIOLOGY AND RELIGION Those branches of cultural anthropology which deal with comparative sociology and magico-religious data are sometimes designated as “ethnology.” It frequently happens that students who have written upon these and closely allied subjects have in the same book treated the archæological, technical, and linguistic aspects of cultural anthropology or ethnology in the larger sense. ”

“ It was inevitable that anthropology, like biology, should first collect and classify its material. Every scrap of knowledge it has brought to light is precious, and its classification of its materials, though like all classifications more or less arbitrary, is useful, if not used for more than it is worth. ”

“ That branch of anthropology which treats of the actual distribution of the human race in its different divisions, as distinguished by physical character, language, institutions, and customs, in contradistinction to ethnography, which treats historically of the origin and filiation of races and nations. ”

“ Other folk, not unobservant, recognize that such a miscellany of votive offerings is evidence of an older condition of culture, and that the variety of objects proves only the decay of tradition, with a consequent confusion of ideas. To some degree this is true, but the ethnologist and the archaeologist can decipher the meaning otherwise, and can show that primitive peoples love to offer a wealth of objects. ”

“ Such is the judgment, at least, of modern research. Ethnology bases its claims to confidence in the recognition of the dispersed family of man, in these proofs. And when they have been eliminated from the dust of antiquity, they are offered as contributions to the body of well considered facts and inferences, which are to compose the thread of antique history and critical inquiry. ”

“ These examples of human handicraft, if wrought by beings similar to ourselves, found in the Post Pleistocene Formation, or Drift, as it is called, awaken the keenest inquiry, and prove to us that not Geology only, but Archæology and Ethnology, in their daily acquisition of new facts, have yet much to learn and much to teach us, of the history of our own race, and of the world on which we live. ”

“ Prehistoric remains, characteristics of bodily form, traits of language, industrial and economic achievements, peculiar customs and beliefs, are the only evidence that we can use,—evidence that was little regarded by history until the anthropological standpoint began to develop. ”

“ Lastly, under the names of sociology and the science of culture, are con sidered the origin and development of arts and sciences, opinions, beliefs, customs, laws, and institutions generally among mankind, their course in time being partly marked out by the direct record of history, while beyond the historical limit our information is continued by inferences from relics of early ages and remote districts, to interpret which is the task of prse-historic archaeology and geology. ”

“ A great deal has been done in quite recent years by way of collating the results of comparative philology with those of anthropology, ethnology, comparative mythology, etc., and reconstructing from the combined data something of the past history of our own and other races or cultures. We are concerned here, not with the way in which those results were arrived at, but with the results themselves. The reconstruction itself has been and is being done by scholars; here the endeavour is rather to make use of their labours ”

“ The study of the works of our earliest known forefathers, "prehistoric archaeology," as it is commonly called, although one of the most recently developed branches of knowledge, is now almost a science by itself, and one which is receiving a great amount of attention in all parts of the civilized world. It investigates the origin of all human culture, endeavors to trace to their common beginning the sources of all our arts, customs, and history. ”

“ The term anthropology now stands for the specific science of man. Ethnology, archæology, and somatology are merely divisions, or convenient groups of problems within the scope of this science. The ideal of anthropology is to coordinate all the data concerning man's culture, language and anatomy, past and present, with a view to solving the problems of his origin and the interpretation of his culture. ”

“ This new science, which investigates the unwritten history of our race, and illustrates, in a most unequivocal manner, that which has been written, has been styled 'Ethnological Archæology;' to it the discourse of our subject is already much indebted, as we will see presently. ”

“ The traditions, customs, and scraps of folk lore which are treasures to the constructive anthropologist, are usually discovered as empty shells, in form as much altered from their original conditions as are those smooth fragments of hollow white cylinders which once held the delicate products of the factory of Keiller or Cairns.
I have said that anthropology has not yet made good its title to be ranked as an independent science. ”

“ The nooks and [Pg 10] crannies of civilization are their hunting-grounds—any corner where man has left a documentary trace of himself. Behold them, eager enthusiasts, besieging the libraries, poring over tomes of deeds and wills and other documents in State and county archives, searching the quaint and musty volumes of town annals, thumbing dusty pages of baptismal registers, and frequenting churchyards to decipher the fast-fading names and dates on mossgrown tombstones, yellow and stained with age, or cracked and chipped by the frosts and rains of many seasons! ”

“ Moreover, the historical value of early tradition does not lie exclusively in the fragments of real history it may preserve. Even the myths which it carries down to later times may become important indirect evidence in the hands of the ethnologist. And ancient compositions handed down by memory from generation to generation, especially if a poetic form helps to keep them in their original shape, often give us, if not a sound record of real events, at least a picture of the state of civilization in which the compositions themselves had their origin. ”

“ Historical investigation tries to get at the causes of the facts of rational life by observing the development of these facts from such as preceded them within the range of separate kindreds, tribes and peoples. The investigation of comparative ethnology inquires after the causes of facts in national life by collecting identical or similar ethnological data wherever they may be found in the world, and by drawing inferences from these materials to identical or similar causes. ”

“ But all these are secondary; the primary ground of classification is the physical conformation of man himself. As to language, the ethnological method, left to itself, can find out nothing whatever. The science of the ethnologer then is primarily physical; it is historical only in that secondary sense in which palæontology, and geology itself, may fairly be called historical. It arranges the varieties of mankind according to a strictly physical classification; what the language of each variety may have been, it leaves to the professors of another branch of study to find out. ”

“ With increasing knowledge of the data of anthropology, the forms of society, of religion, of art, and the development of invention, do not seem quite so simple as they appeared to earlier investigators. Attempts were made to fit the hypothetical typical evolution of mankind to the historical development of culture in different parts of the world, so far as it had been reconstructed. ”

“ These conclusions have been drawn from that great class of tradition preserved by historic peoples in historic times, and yet unmistakably pointing to prehistoric culture. We have been able to show the methods to be adopted for, and the results of, disengaging the myth which has gravitated to the historic person or place from the historic facts which have become part of the legend, and to trace out in the folk-tale facts which belong to a culture far removed from civilised life. ”

“ I wish, however, to draw attention here to a far wider use of the genealogies in anthropological investigation. They bring a concrete element into anthropological work which greatly facilitates inquiry. The lower one goes in the social or intellectual scale in mankind, the greater difficulty is there in dealing with abstractions. The savage mind is almost wholly occupied with the concrete. ”

“ But the scope of the historian is gradually but surely widening. It is no longer possible to shut the door to geography, ethnography, economics, sociology, archæology, and the attendant studies if the historian desires to work his subject out to the full. [2] It is even getting to be admitted that an appeal must be made to folklore, though the extent and the method are not understood. ”

“ If the problems of British ethnology can be solved, history, physical anthropology, archaeology, and philology must combine.
II">THE METHODS OF ANTHROPOLOGY
A lay reader who takes up a treatise on ethnology ought to understand the methods by which anthropologists differentiate the various human types. ”

“ It now leads us on to clinging to the life of our ancestors, their being, and their natures; and beyond that to the fascination of all history, as being the continuity of life, the ever-shifting changes of the one great chain which we see around us at its present stage, and of which we form part. ”

“ And until the common and obviously distinctive patterns of each country can be named at sight, and separated into their various sources, the observer cannot hope to gain that far more essential sense of the national taste of each people, and the sympathetic feeling of the relationship of any form or curve that may chance to be seen,—that conviction of the family and source of each object, which is the illumination of an archaeologist, the guide to fresh suggestions and researches, the mental framework which holds all memories in place. ”

“ If we are justified, as I think we are, in regarding the various grades of culture, observable among the more lowly of the still existing races of man, as representing to a considerable extent those vanished cultures which in their succession formed the different stages by which civilization emerged gradually from a low state, it surely becomes a very important duty for us to study with energy these living illustrations of early human history, in order that the archaeological record may be supplemented and rendered more complete. ”